Hand it to Muslim terrorists, at least when it comes to truly
long-term planning and the Fourteenth Amendment -- according to Texas
Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert. On the floor of the House of
Representatives, he recently offered the following explanation for his desire to change that amendment, which makes anyone born in this country a U.S. citizen:

“I talked to a retired FBI agent who said that one of the things they
were looking at were terrorist cells overseas who had figured out how
to game our system. And it appeared they would have young women, who
became pregnant, would get them into the United States to have a baby.
They wouldn't even have to pay anything for the baby. And then they
would turn back where they could be raised and coddled as future
terrorists. And then one day, twenty... thirty years down the road,
they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life. 'Cause they
figured out how stupid we are being in this country to allow
our enemies to game our system, hurt our economy, get setup in a
position to destroy our way of life."

This may be mad, as well as a figment of Representative Gohmert’s
feverish imagination. It’s no joke, though, as Stephan Salisbury,
author of Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland,
a rare reporter who has long been attending to what’s happening to Arab
American communities in this country, indicates below. The anger about
the prospective “mosque at Ground Zero,” for instance, has caught the
media eye, and in news reports has looked like a singularly strange
“controversy” until last Sunday when the New York Times reported on several
other examples, ranging from Tennessee to California, an indication of
the sort of growing hysteria that two centuries ago here might have
centered around imagined Catholic or Masonic plots.

There’s no countering hysterias like this with reason or logic. It doesn’t matter, for instance, that (as Justin Elliott pointed out recently
in Salon.com) no “mosque” controversy ever developed around Pentagon
prayer practices. And yet Ramadan is celebrated in that building. As
the Washington Timesreported in
2007, a Navy imam called to prayer 100 Department of Defense
employees. “Uniformed military personnel, civilians, and family
members,” the Times' reporter wrote, "faced Mecca and knelt on
adorned prayer rugs chanting their prayers in quiet invocation to
Allah.” All this happened, and continues to happen, not two blocks from Ground Zero, but, as Elliott writes, “inside the
building where 184 people died on Sept. 11, 2001.” It seems, however,
that right-wing reverence for the U.S. military still exceeds right-wing
mania about Muslims, and so “our infiltrated military” stories have yet
to develop.

The present hysteria remains part of a process launched by the Bush administration in 2001 and since promoted by a veritable Fear Inc. in
this country, which has blown anxieties about Islamic terrorism
staggeringly (and profitably) out of all proportion, while turning this
country into a nation of cowards. But beware what you launch: often,
you have no idea where it will end up -- and in whose hands. Tom

There is a distinct creepiness to the controversy now raging around a
proposed Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan. The angry
“debate” over whether the building should exist has a kind of
glitch-in-the-Matrix feel to it, leaving in its wake an aura of
something-very-bad-about-to-happen.

It’s not just that opposition to the building has coalesced around a
phony “Mosque at Ground Zero” shorthand (with its echoes of dust, death,
and evildoers). Many have pointed out -- futilely -- that the complex
will be more than two blocks from the former World Trade Center, around a
corner on Park Place, and will feature an auditorium, spa, basketball
court, swimming pool, classrooms, exhibition space, community meeting
space, 9/11 memorial, and, yes, a prayer space for Muslims. The
shorthand still sticks.

Nor is it just that this is only the most visible of a growing number of nasty controversies over proposed mosques in Tennessee, California, Georgia, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Illinois as well as Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and Midland Beach,
Staten Island, in New York City. Such protests are emerging with
alarming frequency. Nor is it simply that political leaders -- from
Republican presidential wannabes to New York gubernatorial hopefuls --
have sought to exploit the Lower Manhattan controversy. (Sarah Palin demanded that “peaceful Muslims” step up and “refudiate” the plan; Newt Gingrich denounced
the building of such a “mosque” as long as Saudi Arabia bars
construction of churches and synagogues; Rick Lazio, a Republican
campaigning for the governorship of New York state, asserted that the plan somehow subverted the right of New Yorkers “to feel safe and be safe.”)

No, it’s the déjà-vu-ness of the controversy that kindles
special unease, the sense that we’ve been here before as a country, and
the realization that, for a decade, a significant number of our nation’s
political leaders have been honing an anti-Muslim narrative which
fertilizes anti-Muslim sentiment to the point where it is now spreading
like a toxic plume, uncapped and uncontrollable.

The mosque controversy is not really about a mosque at all; it’s
about the presence of Muslims in America, and the free-floating anxiety
and fear that now dominate the nation’s psyche. The mere presence of
Muslims at prayer is now enough to trigger angry protests, as
Bridgeport, Connecticut, police discovered
last week. Those opposing the construction of the center in New York
City are drawing on what amounts to a decade of government-stoked
xenophobia about Muslims, now gathering strength and visibility in a
nation full of deep economic anxieties and increasingly aggressive
far-right grassroots groups. Lower Manhattan and Murfreesboro,
Tennessee, and Temecula, California, are all in this together. And it is
not going to go away simply because the New York Landmarks Preservation
Commission gave its unanimous blessing
to the Islamic center plan. Since that is the case, it’s worth pausing
to consider what has happened here over the past 10 years.

Panic in the Streets

In the panicked wake of 9/11, revenge attacks on Muslims (and
dark-skinned people mistaken for Muslims) swept the country. Hundreds of
beatings and even some random reprisal killings were reported coast to
coast.

On Sept. 17, 2001, the day after he told the nation
that a “crusade” against terror was in order, President Bush stood in
the Islamic Center of Washington and piously proclaimed that “Islam is
peace.” At virtually the same moment across town, Attorney General John
Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III were at a press conference,
announcing that 55,000 tips had flooded into their ballooning 9/11
investigation, an undisclosed number of immigration violators and
uncharged material witnesses were being hauled into custody, Arabic and
Farsi speakers were suddenly in demand at the FBI, and major legislation
was already in the works to beef up government surveillance,
immigration, and anti-terror capabilities. But no, Mueller said, there
was nothing at all to complaints of ethnic targeting from Arab-American
communities.

After the Patriot Act became law that October, Ashcroft launched a
nationwide program of 5,000 “voluntary” interviews with Muslims from the
Middle East. Internal Justice Department memos instructed interviewers
to detain anyone suspected of immigration violations. “Let the
terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay your visa -- even by one
day -- we will arrest you,” Ashcroft proclaimed.

When that initial set of 5,000 interviews was deemed complete
(leading to no terrorism arrests of any kind), Ashcroft announced that
another 3,000 would be conducted. He vowed to find anyone who had
skipped out on the previous “voluntary” round.

By the end of 2001, a minimum of 2,000 Middle Easterners and South
Asians had been taken into custody, the vast majority without criminal
charges of any kind being lodged. Arrests were often highly publicized;
the aftermaths of those arrests were shrouded in secrecy as court and
immigration hearings were closed to family, public, and press. Vague color-coded
attack alerts were announced by federal officials, and citizens were
instructed to be prepared for a second 9/11 at any time. In 2004,
another round of 5,000 voluntary interviews with Arabs and Muslims was
announced.

The FBI began toting up the number and location of mosques around the country. The Census Bureau was drawn into a scheme to identify and enumerate areas with large Middle Eastern populations. The Energy Department was engaged to monitor mosques for suspicious levels of radiation.

A
year after the 9/11 attacks, a special immigration program was
instituted that required men from two dozen predominantly Muslim nations
(and North Korea) to register with immigration authorities. Nearly
84,000 did so, with about 3,000 abruptly detained and over 13,000
promptly subjected to deportation proceedings. Muslims began to
“disappear” from the streets of America. Lawyers wearing yellow shirts
with “Human Rights Monitor” written on the back sought to keep track of
individuals heading into registration centers in New York and Los
Angeles -- and never leaving again.

Not surprisingly, this frenzy of law enforcement activity led many
Americans to believe that there must be a dark reason so much attention
was being paid to so many Muslims. By 2003, announcements of elaborate
terror “plots” and investigations had already taken over the news.
These would regularly serve, like booster shots, to revitalize public
suspicions that foul things were afoot. Muslims in Lodi, California,
were plotting to blow up supermarkets. In Columbus, Ohio, they were targeting malls. In New York City, it was the Herald Square subway station.

Dozens and dozens of such cases have been reported over the past
decade. Virtually all of them involved Middle Eastern and South Asian
Muslims. Virtually none of the supposed plots had any chance of
happening, and many were, in fact, fueled by
zealous government informers and covert agents. As with the numerous
immigration detentions and deportations in the immediate aftermath of
9/11, much publicity surrounded announcements that violent and deadly
“jihadist” plots had been thwarted. Often, when the suspects finally
came to trial, charges and evidence amounted to something far less
ominous (and so, far less publicized).

Nevertheless, the threat, said authorities, was everywhere -- even if it couldn’t be seen.

New Administration, Old Story

Throughout this period, the number of vigilante attacks on mosques,
as well as individual Muslims, continued to rise, though these received
little press attention. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
received 602 credible Muslim civil rights complaints in 2002, 1,019 in
2003, and 1,522 in 2004.Such complaints included 42
hate crimes reported in 2002, 93 in 2003, and 141 in 2004. CAIR also
cited and described several significant acts of violence against
mosques, including bombings and arson, but did not specify the figures.

In its 2009 civil rights report, CAIR said it had processed 2,728
civil rights violations, including 721 that involved mosques or Muslim
organizations, up from 221 mosque incidents in 2006. The organization
expressed some optimism in its report, however, because there had been a
decline in the number of reported hate crimes to 116 in 2008 from 135
the previous year. Again, CAIR reported serious mosque attacks and
vandalism without separating out the figures.

It seems hardly coincidental, at this point, that when authorities
announce another incident or terror plot -- the failed effort to blow up
an SUV in Times Square in May, for instance -- random attacks on
Muslims and Muslim institutions as well quickly follow. For example, a
bomb was detonated
at a mosque in Jacksonville, Florida, shortly after the Times Square
incident. As the Lower Manhattan controversy spread in the news,
arsonists attacked a mosque in Texas, and a church in Gainesville, Florida, announced that it would hold a bonfire of Qurans on the anniversary of 9/11.

The change in presidential administrations has had no discernable
moderating effect on such passions. In fact, as if to assert its own
toughness, the Obama administration has now given its tacit blessing to
legislation introduced in Congress
late in July by Adam Schiff, a congressman from California, that would
carve out “terrorism exceptions” to constitutionally mandated Miranda
warnings. The legislation would extend to up four days the period when
law enforcement agents can question terrorism suspects without informing
them of their right to remain silent and to receive the assistance of
an attorney. If past is prelude, such exceptions will initially have a
disproportionate impact on Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims in
America, only later spreading to wider groups of Americans taken into
custody.

Parallel to the federal law-enforcement focus on Muslims, the past
decade has witnessed a proliferation of anti-Muslim “analysts,” “terror
experts,” political commentators, and websites. This burgeoning
industry, focused on Muslims as virtually a fifth column seeking to take
over the country, has attracted ever more media attention, particularly
as FOX News has chronicled and promoted the rise of the Tea Party
movement.

It is in this alternate universe, after so many years of heightened anti-Muslim sentiments, that a Lower Manhattan prayer space designed to promote reconciliation has become
the dreaded Mosque at Ground Zero, a “monument that would consist of a
mosque for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god,” as Mark Williams,
then-chairman of a group known as the Tea Party Express, put it.

Waiting for the Demagogue

Here we come to the real source of unease over what’s now going on --
the realization that we’ve seen something like this developing before,
only it wasn’t diaperheads and terrorism inflaming the country. It was
dirty commies and Jews then.

Sixty years ago, on February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy rose
before a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, and
delivered the famous speech in which he waved a sheet of paper and claimed
that on it were the names of -- there is dispute -- 57 or 205 known
communists “working and shaping policy in the State Department.” In
doing so, he put his incendiary, eponymous stamp on the most oppressive
period of the Cold War, and as it turned out, the nation was ready for
the message.

McCarthyism did not emerge on that cold day solely from the fevered
imagination of the Wisconsin senator. There had been a drumbeat of
anti-Communist red-baiting, hearings, speeches, treason charges, and
grandstanding coming from Washington for years. The House Committee on
Un-American Activities, anti-communist informer Whittaker Chambers,
ambitious congressman Richard Nixon, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover,
President Harry Truman -- all did yeoman’s work in preparing the soil
for McCarthy and his reckless accusations of “20 years of treason!”

There are some substantial differences between then and now. Most
importantly, McCarthy operated from within the political system, using
his subcommittee chairmanship as a vehicle for pseudo-investigations and
attacks. When his Senate colleagues turned on him following a
particularly reckless campaign against the U.S. Army, McCarthy was
stripped of his chairmanship and his power. A true demagogue, he had no
organization to speak of, only those who feared him and those who
followed him.

By contrast, while some extreme anti-Muslim sentiment is in evidence
in Washington, the real juice for an anti-Muslim movement is now
bubbling up outside the Beltway, much as virulent racist hysteria has,
in the past, bubbled up from the grassroots. In that regard, it’s worth
noting that about a third of America’s five to eight million Muslims are
African American.

Some mainstream politicians have actually tried to tamp down the
Lower Manhattan controversy. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has, for
instance, made numerous comments in support of the project and the
principle of freedom of religion that goes with it. Such statements
have, however, had little effect in quieting the dispute, countered as
they are by opposition not only from the fringes, but from some
mainstream Republican politicians and establishment non-governmental
organizations. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), for example, recently
came out with a statement opposing
the construction plan, despite the fact that the rest of the
opposition, the group said, exhibited elements of bigotry. It is better
to side with bigots, the ADL essentially argued, than ignore the
post-9/11 “healing process.”

Because of the decentralized, grassroots nature of this anti-Muslim
movement and the accompanying hysteria, it will be no easy task to put
the mosque-at-Ground-Zero genie back in its bottle. Those who think that
the decision by the New York City Landmarks Commission to clear the way
for construction is likely to end the antagonism are undoubtedly engaged in
wishful thinking. There are virtually endless potential flashpoints
embedded along the road ahead, nor are the issue and its passions purely
dependant on what happens in Manhattan, where a recent poll showed a majority of residents favor construction (although a majority of all New York City residents do not).

In California, those opposed to mosque construction in Temecula were
urged to protest by rallying at the mosque with their dogs. Muslims “hate dogs,”
an unsigned email alert erroneously claimed. Counter-demonstrators
turned out. There, too, the dispute continues. “The Islamic foothold is
not strong here, and we really don't want to see their influence
spread,” Pastor Bill Rench of Temecula’s Calvary Baptist Church told the Los Angeles Times.
“There is a concern with all the rumors you hear about sleeper cells
and all that. Are we supposed to be complacent just because these people
say it's a religion of peace? Many others have said the same thing.”

In Kentucky, a fledgling controversy over a proposed mosque in
Florence, south of Cincinnati, is also spreading thanks to anonymous
communications. One unsigned protest flyer stated that “Americans need to stop the takeover of our country, our government is not protecting us.”

Such sentiments are common to virtually all anti-Muslim protests:
somehow, Muslims are taking over. Oklahoma legislators, fearing the
imposition of Islamic law in Oklahoma courts, have even asked voters to amend
the state constitution to forbid it. The government, increasing
numbers of Americans evidently believe, is passively allowing Muslim
subversion, and citizens need to defend themselves.

In Tennessee, a rancorous fight over a planned mosque in Murfreesboro
has been rife with such sentiments. Lou Ann Zelenik, a Tennessee
Republican congressional candidate locked in a tough primary race,
denounced the mosque plan, characterized its leaders as foreign agents
with a “radical agenda,” and received strong support from the Wilson
County Tea Party, a local group.

On its website, the Tea Party curtsies
to the U.S. Constitution and then quickly cuts to the chase: “But this
question must be asked based on repeated violence committed by Islamists
in the name of religion: Is Islam nothing more than a front for
terrorism?” Tennessee’s lieutenant governor, Ron Ramsey, a Republican
candidate for governor, went out of his way last month to characterize
Islam as a “cult” which may not warrant First Amendment protection:
“You can even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is
it a nationality, a way of life, or a cult -- whatever you want to call
it...”

The proliferation of, and acceptance of, such talk, particularly from
major political candidates, may be preparing the American ground for
the emergence of a leader who can synthesize the demonizing and
scapegoating of Muslims, fears augmented by severe economic anxiety, the
maturing of extreme rightwing activism, and a widespread and growing
contempt for official Washington. If that happens, the nation -- and
American Muslims -- could face something far worse than McCarthy, who
held sway in a golden era of rising expectations and general economic
growth.

Mosque controversies will be the least of it then.

Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland (Nation Books).

[Note on further reading: The CAIR 2005 report on civil rights abuses with some comparative statistics can be found in .pdf format here. The CAIR 2009 report and statistics, also in .pdf format, can be found here.]